Well I've been reading for 2 weeks now, scouring every forum and page I can find...Hard to find good tech info on the PS2's guts. The PS2 I received powered up and went straight to the browser?..with numerous media I got "NO DATA"...ok I figured just clean the laser and good to go....well that's not the case...this PS2 was dropped...I inspected the cables and watched the CD with the top off during power up... the laser would home and zoom up and down a bit... I figured ok that's good... but the spindle motor wouldn't spin the disc more that a split second...so I figured it was a spindle motor problem and not a laser issue... After cleaning the rubber ring the media seats on, I tried the tape/magnet tricks thinking that maybe it was just slipping on the spindle...nope
Wrong...after completely tearing apart the PS2(cause I was gonna tweak the DVD/CD pots) I found a tear in the ribbon cable on the laser...not on the removable cable but the ribbon that's on the bottom of the laser assemblely itself...
I have no clue how this could've tore by being dropped.. oh well time for a new laser unit...with all the "no data" and "data read errors" and other misc. problems I think Sony should've been far more willing to help us poor consumers...